The final obstacle to expanding the College Football Playoff from four teams to a 12-team format as early as the 2024 season has been cleared, according to multiple reports.
Rose Bowl game organizers informed CFP officials on Wednesday that they are willing to alter agreements for the first two years of the larger playoff. College football’s oldest active bowl game had been given until Wednesday to make a decision, according to reports earlier this week.
“We won’t have any comment on anything until we are ready to announce our plans to move forward early or not,” a CFP spokesperson said when asked if the group had given the Rose Bowl a deadline.
The CFP Board of Managers (a group made up of a chancellor and 10 college presidents) decided in September to push forward with the idea of the 12-team expansion beginning as late as 2026 while exploring all options to begin the expansion as early as 2024.
The Rose Bowl has reportedly signed an agreement that helped clear that hurdle and joined the other five bowl games – Cotton, Fiesta, Orange, Peach and Sugar – in order to move forward.
The Rose Bowl reportedly had some level of uncertainty about its role in the playoff expansion and its desire to retain its traditional 2 p.m. PT time slot on Jan. 1.
It remains unclear what traditions might be broken, including having the game played on the same day as the Rose Parade, as a result of the signed agreement with the CFP, but a person with knowledge of the discussions between game organizers and CFP officials told The Associated Press that the Rose Bowl is prepared to be flexible.
The five other bowls and host cities for the championship games scheduled to be held after the 2024 and ’25 seasons had already agreed to accommodate a new CFP format. Had the Rose Bowl stood in the way of early expansion, the 122-year-old bowl game dubbed the Granddaddy of Them All could have been shut out of the next television contract, which begins in 2026.
The Rose Bowl prefers a traditional Pac-12-vs.-Big Ten matchup whenever possible, but to have a 12-team playoff, the game would need to host a quarterfinal in its traditional Jan. 1 time slot.
The original 12-year contract the CFP has with ESPN expires after the 2025-26 season, and CFP officials had been unwilling to make any binding commitments about the series beyond 2025.
Expanding the playoff is expected to bring in an extra $450 million in gross revenue over the final two years of the current contract.
Two weeks ago, Rose Bowl organizers told The AP in a statement: “We have no intention of being the lone roadblock that would keep expansion from happening before the end of its current cycle.”
The Rose Bowl has served as a CFP semifinal game in 2018 and 2021, with the latter being played in Arlington, Texas because the City of Pasadena was unable to receive an exception from California to allow fans to attend during the pandemic-shortened season.
The Fiesta Bowl and the Peach Bowl will host the 2021 semifinal game games. The Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl are currently slotted as semifinal games for the 2023-24 season on Jan. 1.
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The Fiesta and Peach Bowls weren’t scheduled to host a semifinal game, under the four-team playoff, again until 2025.
“In the case of successfully (expanding the playoffs), we would be a semifinal in 2025 and a quarterfinal in 2024,” Peach Bowl CEO Gary Stokan told the Southern California News Group on Nov. 15. “Atlanta would also host the national championship game after the ’24 season. That’s baked in no matter if they move forward with the playoffs or not under the existing contract.
“The only difference would be that in 2024 that if they move the playoffs forward we would be a quarterfinal. If they don’t, we would likely host two top-10 teams that year.”
The Rose Bowl did not respond to the Southern California News Group’s requests for comment on Wednesday.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.